U.S. Ranked Worst for Workers' Rights Among Major Economies - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-06-18/u-s-ranked-worst-for-workers-rights-among-major-economies <comment><USER2> Does not surprise me. As a Norwegian I have experienced working for smaller companies getting bought up by US multinationals in many occasions.

The new American bosses tend to be surprised that employees have rights.

I remember they went through their employee handbook covering the rules we should follow.

Some of the rules they had on the books which was illegal in Norway:

1\. Ban talking about politics and religion at work. Illegal in Norway as freedom of speech is a protected by government.

2\. Drug tests of employees. Also illegal unless you operate heavy and dangerous equipment and have been given special permission by government to do such tests.

3\. Criminal background checks. Also illegal unless you work with say children or in the military.

Of course we also kept hearing stories about how our colleagues in the US offices got treated. Not very nice. People got fired on the spot and kicked out.

In Norway you got to give a 2-3 month notice. You cannot suddenly spring on people "you are fired!"

And the reason for firing has to be legitimate. Insubordination e.g. isn't a valid reason to be fired in Scandinavia. You have to be clearly neglectful of your job, or there has to be economic hard times.

Hence you don't have to be worried about getting fired for say pissing off your boss as long as you are doing a decent job.

<comment><USER3> > Ban talking about politics and religion at work. Illegal in Norway as > freedom of speech is a protected by government.

I'm all for freedom of speech, but there are certain policies that make me uncomfortable. Like talking about sex should be freedom of speech, but is taboo in the workplace.

It's all about protecting everyone's rights to feel comfortable (by banning topics that enrage people.).

> Criminal background checks.

This is common practice as people don't want to hire workers who will steal or cause other issues.

What's wrong with that?

> People got fired on the spot and kicked out.

Sure, that's pro worker, but not pro business. If someone isn't doing their job, they gotta go. Not 2-3 months. Now.

<comment><USER4> You seem to underestimate the level of productivity and willingness to bring the company forward, that comes from a good worker/business relationship. And a good relationship requires good management and trust from both sides.

I would try to explain that in more detail, but I feel like your opinion is already very much set in stone.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Strange not including China as a major economy. I thought they were huge!

<comment><USER6> It's a badly written article and headline. The US was ranked worst among the G7, a very specific group of countries.

<comment><USER7> Yeah, basically among the first-world countries. Which the US probably is no more.

<comment><USER8> In my opinion, the US is basically two countries due to the inequality.

For professionals, it's possibly the best place to live in the world.

For the working class, you're better off elsewhere.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is going to catch a lot of flak because it's a rather cynical observation. It's interesting that almost all the best countries for workers rights on the map have stagnant GDPs in the past decade outside of Uruguay and Ireland.

<comment><USER10> Yet another hint we shouldn't consider GDP to be the benchmark for economies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Interestingly it's also ranked one of the highest for average wages: [https://data.oecd.org/earnwage/average- wages.htm](https://data.oecd.org/earnwage/average-wages.htm) .

<comment><USER2> That is a bullshit measure. That is an arithmetic average pulled up by the excessive compensation to the 1% in America.

Look at e.g. the wage of a McDonalds worker in the US and it is among the lowest in the west.

I think e.g. in Norway you make 3-4x what a US McDonalds worker makes.

It also does not take into account that US workers have almost no vacation and long work days.

US workers don't have they high hourly wage. They just work their ass off while Europeans are at the beach enjoying life with their family.

Ok, a simplification but life is not great for American workers and they ought to demand better treatment.

<comment><USER12> You are combating one extreme with another. 1% vs McDonalds workers.

Look at the middle 90% - they are the highest paid in the world with a record low 4% unemployment rate (covid-excluding).

THIS is why worker protections are not priority. Employment mobility in the US, combined with the highest salaries makes them almost useless.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> America is a third world country with iphones.

</comment><comment><USER10> [https://outline.com/4EDx3n](https://outline.com/4EDx3n)

</comment><comment><USER14> While at the same time this is the real headline "U.S ranked first as country most desired to immigrate to among all countries".

Conversely: "Highly paid tech workers in the US believe Marxism will do wonders for the average person"

<comment><USER15> >> U.S ranked first as country most desired to immigrate to among all countries"

This is because US has very good marketing and most of the numbers are deceptive. I think if you ask typical US immigrants how the reality corresponds with their prior expectations, I think the theme will be disappointment.

Huge US salaries sound very attractive to people from other countries, but I think that when they actually arrive on the ground and they realize how high the costs of living are (especially rents), and they realize that they have almost 0 negotiating power due to visa requirements, the salaries don't look so good anymore.

The same can be said about big cities in any developed country. People leave small towns in droves to live in big cities with big salaries but it's only when they arrive there physically that they understand how terrible a deal it actually is. A person who lives in a small or medium-sized town is able to buy multiple houses with land on a small salary and even rent them out to others for profit. In big cities, a typical highly paid worker can barely afford a single shoebox-sized apartment for themselves.

I've worked as a software developer all over the world (Australia, Russia, The Netherlands, UK, Germany) and I worked remotely for a US company for 1 year and have spoken with hundreds of people about this so I should have a pretty good idea of how it works.

<comment><USER11> >I think if you ask typical US immigrants how the reality corresponds with their prior expectations, I think the theme will be disappointment.

Do you have any numbers on what percentage return home?

<comment><USER16> One paper showed about 1/3rd. Source: [https://www.pnas.org/content/116/1/116/tab-figures- data](https://www.pnas.org/content/116/1/116/tab-figures-data)

<comment><USER17> Yea, that paper is trying to prove their novel way of estimating emigration flow. I couldn't find anywhere that their numbers were proven with hard reported numbers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> US needs to emulate more worker-friendly nations like South Korea and Japan.

<comment><USER19> >South Korea

Wow you Sir are the blindest of the blinds...really South Korea and Japan???

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_in_South_Korea](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_in_South_Korea)

[http://www.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20190501000216](http://www.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20190501000216)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_in_Japan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_in_Japan)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karoshi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karoshi)

<comment><USER20> He was clearly joking, but Japan's suicide rates have dropped. Meanwhile countless Americans are dropping out of life, overdosing on drugs, and their deaths are counted as a separate statistic. There were about 46,000 suicides in America in 2016 and 70,000 drug overdose deaths in 2017.[1] Looking at rates of unemployment, depression, and other problems, I doubt the overwhelming majority of those are completely accidental. If someone were to close their eyes and slam the gas pedal and accept whatever happens, we'd rule that a suicide, but we try saying drug overdoses are just accidents. It's time to take it seriously and recognize that something in life is driving people to accept the risks of dangerous drugs. Including them in the statistic would be enough to push the American suicide rate to about double Japan's.

But to focus on the actual topic, most of the problem in Japan is social pressure. Workers have actual legal rights. Employers are required to offer vacation time and workers can't be fired without good reason. It's actually incredibly difficult to fire someone.

[1] [https://www.cdc.gov/injury/features/prescription-drug- overdo...](https://www.cdc.gov/injury/features/prescription-drug- overdose/index.html)

<comment><USER21> > Including them in the statistic enough to push the American suicide rate to > about double Japan's.

Including all drug overdoses in suicides would be a very far overreaching fabrication requiring knowledge that you can never possess about the person that died (you have to know their state of mind and intent at the time of overdose). It also does a disservice to the aspect of how extraordinarily dangerous opioid drug addiction is and how easy it is to overdose by accident (especially if fentanyl is involved).

If we're going to play that game, then you have to use that god-like power to remove all suicides that didn't really mean to do it and all accidental drug overdoses.

Magically the number just dropped by 2/3.

Suicide is defined by a successful attempt to kill one's self. The fact is you have no idea what the intent of all the people that overdose on drugs is, so conflating them is plainly incorrect.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I hate to say it but, at this point this kinda stuff comes across as anti- American propaganda to me.

It's always an assertion that the U.S. is terrible on some metric that upon further digging was measured in some arbitrary way to get the desired conclusion.

Here's the thing: living in the United States, for a significant percentage of the population, is pretty awesome.

For people not within that group, maybe it is easy to believe that the U.S. is dystopian.

But IMO the solution might really be to keep working at extending the awesome to the rest of the people. Not be disingenuous about the awesome, that makes people want to tear everything down.

<comment><USER14> The poorest states in US have higher wealth than the GDP/capita of say UK and other western EU countries.

What does that tell you?

<comment><USER23> People in the UK don't live in trailer parks

<comment><USER22> What is wrong with a trailer park. I've lived in a trailer park.

Is this just a random classist dig? Or are you under the impression that trailer parks are an unmitigated hell?

Some people in the U.K. do live in public housing, don't know what it's like, perhaps it is way nicer than a trailer park. But I don't know, do you?

<comment><USER23> Maybe the perception is different but to me living in a caravan however big feels like one step above living in a motel which seems to be another thing that hand to mouth Americans have to put up with. You'd think that in a country as big and rich as America that workers could afford a home.

<comment><USER8> "Trailers" in trailer parks are not portable like a caravan or recreational vehicle.

They are full modular homes that are delivered by truck, yes, so they're initially _on a trailer_. But once they are "installed" they are full homes. They can't be moved on a whim, it would cost thousands of dollars to relocate a trailer home.

In other words, it's just a factory-built home that's delivered via truck in one piece.

Think of like a nice three bedroom apartment, that's what a brand new mobile home would get you. You can also get doublewides that are delivered on two trailers and put together into one home. Here's an example:

[https://www.redmanhomesofindiana.com/home-plans- photos/advan...](https://www.redmanhomesofindiana.com/home-plans- photos/advantage-1680-265)

Mobile homes can be built on an owned plot of land, or on rented space ("trailer parks").

Mobile homes may be one of the best values in America in terms of comfortable, detached living at a low cost. The idea that people in mobile homes live in squalor seems to me to be somewhat discriminatory.

<comment><USER23> Fair enough, I still don't like the sound of them one little bit though. No one in this country would consider one of those a house though, however well appointed they are. The way people living in them are portrayed on TV/film doesn't help either though.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The China Boom on US Campuses - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/07/education/07china-t.html?ref=education

<comment><USER2> I am a Chinese who went to college (a small liberal arts college) in the States. This was 10 years ago, so I am not part of the current wave. I returned to China after graduation, and have recently begun interviewing applicants for my alma mater (because there are now so many applicants from China). I have been meeting currently enrolled students and applicants. Here are a few observations.

\- there are indeed a lot more of them than before. at the time I was attending, each year we had maybe one student from China. Now they enroll 5-6 every year.

\- more rich kids. when i was attending, the chinese students were all attending on a full scholarship from the school (private US education cost being what it was, and Chinese per capita GDP being what it was, few Chinese families could afford it without the scholarship) - these probably explains why they admitted only one student from China per year. but these days, the families don't seem to bat an eye paying the full $40K+/year.

\- students are getting more mainstream. in the 90s, applying to colleges from China was like a hack. nobody knew much about anything. to even dream of such things was to be a little quirky. but these days there are all these SAT prep courses and consultants (two of my friends were in this business), and high schools have dedicated advisors on applying to US colleges. and this shows in the students admitted. I remember back then the Chinese students were more creative and original and adventurous (for coming to the US is a risky/adventurous thing to do. selection bias here, not unlike the adventurous 1st generation immigrants coming to the States); these days we get far more over-achieving resume-builders who were president of student clubs, and I think will go on to be investment bankers and have successful careers and I hope will donate back to the school generously one day. Instead of the odd kid who couldn't fit in, and said "f&!k it, I am getting the hell out of here" -- I was such a kid. (I realize this is probably an unfair judgment because I did not have as much interaction with the current students/applicants as I had with people whom I attended school with.)

I am quite ambivalent about the situation. I am happy that my school is getting some attention at this end of the world. but I don't know how I feel about the change in the kind of students we attract and will have as alumni.

</comment><comment> barry-cotter In brief; a collection of anecdotes about the rapidly increasing number of PRC students at US universities at undergraduate level, with little in the way of structure.

Interesting points; The Chinese are going everywhere, including no name horribly expensive private colleges. They often experience culture shock and find the drinking and party culture not much fun. The native USAns' social circles are heavily race stratified, the Chinese often socialise very heavily among themselves, living in houses that are all Chinese for example.

\- Britain and Australia got there first with the realisation that foreign students can be conned into going to third or fourth tier universities and paying handsomely for it. \- There is enormous money in preparing and "preparing" students for going abroad. \- Interesting snippets about some universities in the article; the University of Vermont was less than 1% international student until quite recently, Northwestern either needs money or wants to expand its brand, and Columbia like Stanford has an education programme.

<comment><USER3> > Britain and Australia got there first with the realisation that foreign > students can be conned into going to third or fourth tier universities and > paying handsomely for it

In Australia, this is partly because the price charged to domestic students is price-controlled. The "Group of 8" (conceptually our Ivy League) charge the same as distance education universities.

And the amount received is not very much. Fees for international students are unregulated and so it has come to pass that Australian students are largely educated at the expense of foreigners.

It's starting to unravel because the current government have closed a 'loophole' that led from the student visa to permanent residency.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is the third time I've clicked on a link on the HN frontpage today and been sent to a NYT login page rather than something interesting. I know that "(nytimes.com)" is behind the link but I feel it behooves the submitter to point out that it is required: that open access should be able to be safely assumed.

<comment><USER5> Try my weekend project: [http://viewtext.org/article?url=http%3a%2f%2fwww.nytimes.com...](http://viewtext.org/article?url=http%3a%2f%2fwww.nytimes.com%2f2010%2f11%2f07%2feducation%2f07china-t.html%3fref%3deducation)

<comment><USER4> Very nice. Are you using a variation of the Arc90 readability algorithm or something else? Aha I just saw you talk about them in your "about" page. I was going to do something similar with the python readability port[1] and Flask but hadn't got around to it. I am glad someone did, and did it far more impressively than I could have.

[1]<https://github.com/gfxmonk/python-readability>

<comment><USER5> Thanks! I took Readability and ported it over to C#. It's not an exact port as I don't have the DOM and some features of JavaScript in C#. It's using the same algorithm for most of it.

I did other things too, such as making RSS fees contain the full article, pull text from PDFs, rewrite links back through the reader...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I just went to a small alumni event from my university yesterday and spoke to some of the "development" people. One of the initiatives the university has had in the last 4-5 years has been increasing the undergrad enrollment by ~30% (very controversial with the alumni). Part of that strategy it to greatly increase foreign undergrad enrollment. The people from the university said that in the last couple of years the university endowment has down better than many of its "peer institutions", in large part due to the full tuition paying international students. In contrast to the NYT story, it seems that many of the international students I've heard about are actually being paid for by their governments, although a lot are just from (relatively) rich families as well.

</comment><comment><USER7> This is a mirror image of the situation in Vietnam, not surprisingly. Loads of families who have saved too much money and are willing to send their ill- prepared children to no-name American universities (or community colleges). Lots of stories of students adjusting to student life abroad "too well", dropping out and spending their parents' tuition money on partying. In either case, ROI can easily be measured in decades.

OTOH, I see China's education system rapidly catching up, in sciences although maybe not in liberal arts.

</comment><comment><USER8> For those with stamina, single page link:

[http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/07/education/07china-t.html?_...](http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/07/education/07china-t.html?_r=1&ref=education&pagewanted=all)

This collection of snippets about Chinese undergraduates in the US doesn't really have much of a hook.

</comment><comment><USER9> Now we just need to sell our house surplus to the PRC students after they graduate. Two birds, one stone.

They're going to work and steal our jobs no matter what. They might as well do it on US soil and pay US taxes.</comment>


Post-mortem of this weekend's NPM incident - <AUTHOR> http://blog.npmjs.org/post/169582189317/incident-report-npm-inc-operations-incident-of <comment><USER2> This is a good post-mortem with clear, policy-based remediations. Nicely done.

I wonder why they are only preventing republishing for 24 hours. Is there a good reason to allow a package namespace to be recycled with less than, say, a week? Is it based on the assumption that the only case where it comes up is during an incident, and 24 hours is enough time to assume an incident will be resolved? I'm curious what went in to that number.

<comment><USER3> Why allow namespace recycling at all? The potential harm is high and the potential benefit is some slight convenience.

If npm packages used a Github-style "author/package" format, name collision would never be an issue again.

<comment><USER4> >If npm packages used a Github-style "author/package" format, name collision would never be an issue again.

They have that, and many are finally starting to take advantage of it (with babel being the most prominent with their latest version)

But this doesn't completely "fix" the problem, since the exact same conflicts can still happen with the "author" name (if someone takes "google\" there are going to be some very upset californians)

<comment><USER5> > (if someone takes "google\" there are going to be some very upset > californians)

Not a problem at all. They will just get the name by force. It already happened before, google "npm kik".

<comment><USER4> Yeah, but it's still a "problem" in that it _technically_ doesn't change anything from the current system.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> So, a spammer uploaded something containing copied data from a legitimate user and npm deleted everything from that user. Oy.

Seems like npm might want to review the policy that allows stuff like that to happen.

Even if a user violates the spam policy (which, to be clear, it seems the affected user in this case did NOT do), that hardly seems to be appropriate grounds for deleting everything the user has ever published on npm.

That is a policy that is just begging for griefing.

<comment><USER7> Are "joe jobs" still a thing?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_job](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_job)

> A joe job is a spamming technique that sends out unsolicited e-mails using > spoofed sender data. Early joe jobs aimed at tarnishing the reputation of > the apparent sender or inducing the recipients to take action against them > [...]

<comment><USER8> Yep. I had one against me mid last year.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > we have policies against ever running SQL by hand against production > databases—but in this case we were forced to do so

Uh... Add in the fact that staff are now trigger happy, since a single button can do a lot of damage.

</comment><comment><USER10> _Our first action, which began immediately after the incident concluded, was to implement a 24-hour cooldown on republication of any deleted package name._

Why not infinity hours? I don't get it.

<comment><USER11> If it's a spam package that gets deleted, that would mean you'd quickly run out of available names.

<comment><USER12> Why can't they just reuse when it is apparent the case is harmful (as in, people complain and check number of downloads and dependent packages) by blocking the name and disallow reuse for any other cases?

<comment><USER11> Hmm, I'm not sure if I can follow your question, but I'm guessing that they're already planning to do what you want?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > Our first action, which began immediately after the incident concluded, was > to implement a 24-hour cooldown on republication of any deleted package name

I don't understand this. Why hard delete packages at all? Soft deleting feels like it would be easier and would stop people republishing with the same name.

They could also bake their warning process for dependent libraries (i.e. "this package is gone!") into the soft delete process.

</comment><comment><USER14> I feel like a project that could help with this to identify package importance by the dependents and downloads.

<comment><USER14> I think I might actually try this out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> > At the time of Saturday's incident, however, we did not have a policy to > publish placeholders for packages that were deleted if they were spam.

I see this acknowledgement, but I cannot find where they will remedy this by putting placeholders in place of spam removals. As a concession, maybe only placeholders for spam removals of packages that are older than X days or depended on (explicitly or transitively) by X packages. Did I miss where the remedy for this spam-removed-package-reuse was in the blog post?

<comment><USER16> They have added a 24hour re-publishing cooldown for all package removals regardless of reason. Exceptions are made for the original publisher and npm staff.

Explained somewhere near the bottom of the post, basic rational is that it gives them time to notice fuckups and fix them.

<comment><USER15> This does not alleviate the issue where you can reuse package names. I suppose they believe what they mark as spam packages won't be used enough or is already bad enough that reusing the name is harmless. And they probably also believe that they can catch fuckups in a day. I don't think either are necessarily true and are only true in this case because it hit popular dep trees. But what happens when something is erroneously marked as spam that's not as popular and the downstream dependents don't realize in 24 hours? If the problem is that "placeholders" are too heavy, then they could be made lighter weight or put some rules around when they will add them and when they won't.

<comment><USER17> My guess is that the cost of the placeholders is indeed what is driving their decision, though perhaps it is a premature optimization.

Maybe they've had situations where a spammer has created a very large number (millions, billions?) of packages. It's possible that the majority of user submissions are automated spam from botnets. I would assume npm has some mitigations in place to prevent this abuse in the first place, such as rate limiting and captchas, though maybe that's not enough to stem the tide.

Though, given that they say they have humans doing the package deletion, that makes me think that the number of spam packages created can't be that high. Certainly not high enough to outweigh the risks of package name reuse. Increase your prices a few pennies a month so you can afford to store the placeholders forever.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


CNN Money on Bitcoin used in brick'n'mortal businesses - <AUTHOR> http://money.cnn.com/video/technology/2011/07/18/t_bitcoin_currency.cnnmoney/

<comment><USER2> Once all the NFC phones arrive, and stores start adopting NFC payments, I predict an explosion of Bitcoin payments in real stores. Right now it's still too much of a hassle to pay with Bitcoin in a store I believe. NFC payments should make it a piece of cake to do that in stores that want to accept Bitcoin.</comment>


Boeing scrambles to contain fallout from deadly crash - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/11/business/ethiopian-airline-crash.html <comment><USER2> As mechanical engineering students at my college, we analyze failures of engineering ethics in the past to better inform our decisions in the future. We analyze a number of situations, always the culpability of the engineer is placed first and foremost to us. Whether legal culpability falls on the engineer, we are taught that the moral culpability falls on us as the arbiters of safety. I can already see that the 737 Max failures will be taught 10 years from now in the ethics classes I currently take.

<comment><USER3> > As mechanical engineering students at my college, ... always the culpability > of the engineer is placed first and foremost to us

In college we learned about the engineering & product decisions that led to the challenger disaster. There's a famous line that is rumored to have been said at one of the last design meetings before the disaster: "lets take off our engineering hats and put on your management hats". Personally, I doubt this sentence was uttered, but even the rumor conveys the point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Singapore just grounded all their 737 Max flights. Aeromexico and GOL grounded their 737 Max planes today. Soon we'll (U.S.) be the only country left flying these.

<comment><USER5> Today was the first time I ever checked the type of plane on a flight.

<comment><USER6> Me too. Seems like [https://seatguru.com](https://seatguru.com) is the best site for figuring out the type of plane for a flight.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> On people eschewing their 737 MAX flights, I would argue it's probably even safer to be on a 737 MAX these next few days since every airline and their pilots will be on edge with that particular model.

<comment><USER3> > I would argue it's probably even safer to be on a 737 MAX these next few > days since every airline and their pilots will be on edge with that > particular model

You're assuming that being "on edge" is sufficient to prevent a systemic design flaw. Without a proper investigation, it's not clear that is true at all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Boeing and the FAA no doubt believe they are protecting shareholders by not grounding the fleet, but they're risking their reputation. If it turns out that Boeing is at fault, will the American media/industrial complex be able to keep a lid on it? I doubt it.

<comment><USER9> I haven't seen any evidence that the two Max crashes are related. The first one was the result of Lion Air flying a plane that was not airworthy because its AOA sensor was known to be faulty.

There is no information about the cause of the second crash as of yet. You're making a claim about the purported alignment of Boeing, the FAA, and the "American media/industrial complex" (whatever that is) but I'm not aware that there is such a thing. What do you know that the rest of us don't?

<comment><USER8> You have the wrong standard of proof. Boeing and the FAA should be erroring on the side of caution, not hiding behind _innocent until proven guilty_.

And in case it's not totally clear, the caution should be for the passengers, not shareholders.

> _" its AOA sensor was known to be faulty."_

The plane was what, two months old? It should have been non-lethal even if a troop of rabid baboons was hired to maintain it.

<comment><USER10> I don't think that's actually rational, in the sense of minimizing loss of life. If you ground all these planes worldwide, what's going to happen? Either people will take older planes, which are in worse condition, or they'll take smaller planes / alternative routes, which are more dangerous, or they'll take cars, which are much more deadly.

Grounding the planes only guarantees saving lives if people stay at home instead, which isn't going to happen. If Boeing legitimately believes these planes are still no riskier than older ones (and it sounds like they do and that they have a reason for that belief), they're _saving_ lives by keeping them in the air.

<comment><USER11> That's not remotely true. The fatality rate from air travel is so low that taking alternative jets will be much safer. The new plane's selling point is efficiency so it's used on long haul routes which nobody is going to drive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> What an awful metaphor – "contain fallout" – for the NYT to use in its current online headline. ("Boeing Scrambles to Contain Fallout From Deadly Ethiopia Crash")

It makes it sound like there's some toxic debris Boeing is still racing to clean-up, when in fact the story is just about financial/reputational after- effects.

(NYT's original print headline for this story, "Crisis for Boeing As Safety Worry Grounds New Jet", at least avoided the problematic toxic-debris implication – though it somewhat implied the jet was grounded everywhere, or by Boeing, when it's just been grounded by some jurisdictions and carriers.)

<comment><USER13> > It makes it sound like there's some toxic debris Boeing is still racing to > clean-up, when it fact the story is just about financial/reputational after- > effects.

It doesn't make it sound like that at all. I don't think anyone except maybe you reads it that way. "Fallout" well-understood to mean "effects" or "results".

<comment><USER14> I read it that way as well—-words do have secondary and tertiary connotations, and any competent journalist knows how to use composition and careful word choice to more effectively convey a particular narrative.

<comment><USER13> Here are some other recent NY Times headlines that use the word fallout

Trauma May Have Fallout Over Generations

Cambridge Analytica and Facebook: The Scandal and the Fallout So Far

As Trump Struggles With Helsinki's Fallout, Congress Faces a New Charge: Complicity

Inside Uber's $100,000 Payment to a Hacker, and the Fallout

Nissan and Renault Wrestle With the Fallout From Carlos Ghosn's Arrest

Fallout is widely used to mean "affect-effects" with no secondary or tertiary connotations.

I mean....you really thought there was some kind of nuclear disaster in Helsinki after reading that headline?

<comment><USER12> All your examples use 'fallout' about abstract occurrences – not situations where an actual plane-and-jet-fuel crashed-and-exploded from the sky, throwing some _actual_ 'fallout' across a debris field.

As far as I can tell, clean-up crews are having no notable problems with the fallout from the crash. Boeing is scrambling to contain the damage to its business.

<comment><USER15> Nobody with a full command of the language uses "fallout" to refer to a debris field. It is most commonly used in the abstract sense, to refer to negative after-effects, or else in the technical sense, for radioactive pollution.

<comment><USER12> The 'fallout' isn't the field itself, but toxic stuff that falls from the sky after an explosion.

No competent headline writer would use that figurative language around an explosive incident where there might be literal 'fallout'.

(The NYT uses 'fallout' to refer to the literal toxic materials thrown off from a non-nuclear explosion, as in stories like [https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/21/world/asia/cyanide- levels...](https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/21/world/asia/cyanide-levels- tianjin-china-explosion.html). And also to refer to toxic off-gassing from other processes, as in the headline at [https://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/23/us/home-drug-making- labor...](https://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/23/us/home-drug-making-laboratories- expose-children-to-toxic-fallout.html.))

<comment><USER15> > toxic stuff that falls from the sky

I know... "radioactive pollution."

The public would not expect a civilian airliner to be nuke-powered.

<comment><USER12> As noted in my examples, the NYT regularly uses 'fallout' to refer to non- radioactive toxics emerging from explosions and other activities as well. This usage is also confirmed by many dictionaries.

<comment><USER15> The Times in the first (and only working) link uses fallout in the "problematic aftereffects" sense, although I can see how this might be confusing.

<comment><USER12> The use of "toxic fallout" in the 1st link is pretty clearly referring to literal toxic chemicals released. And if you remove the '.' from the 2nd link, you'll see the same in the "toxic fallout" headline there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Some statistically significant percentage of xbox 360s are starting to red light for customers running a certain model number. Microsoft assures customers that there's no need to panic as this particular model has been reliable for a long time, and it could just be a statistical anomaly. Microsoft is currently investigating the issue but consumers are weary about paying full price for a product that might break.

Substitute xbox 360 with PLANE, substitute microsoft with BOEING, substitute "weary about paying full price" with "dying in a horrible fiery death".

I'm not sure why this is contentious. Be on the safe side and wait for the investigation to complete in case there's some kind of unexpected single point of failure caused by mechanical defects.

<comment><USER3> > xbox 360s are starting to red light ... substitute "weary about paying full > price" with "dying in a horrible fiery death" ... wait for the investigation > to complete

Paying full price and dying a fiery death don't exactly seem like comparable substitutions.

<comment><USER16> Planes don't just fall out of the sky. Having 2 major crashed on the same model could indicate mechanical defects.

When microsoft faced an issue with statistically increased failure rates they initially played the plausible deniability game ( [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox_360_technical_problems#Re...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox_360_technical_problems#Response_to_rate_of_failure) ). In fact this is the only response you will ever get from a public company with short term looking stockholders.

I definitely wouldn't buy that xbox for $300 if I heard similar news reports, but I sure as hell wouldn't buy that $300 plane ticket and bet my life on boeing's words.

<comment><USER3> > I definitely wouldn't buy that xbox for $300 if I heard similar news > reports, but I sure as hell wouldn't buy that $300 plane ticket and bet my > life on boeing's words.

I suppose we agree, but just to a different extent. I could conceivably buy an Xbox knowing that it might crash at some point. But I wouldn't buy an airline ticket knowing it might crash at some point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Seems like anti-stall software shouldn't be killing more people than actual stalls.

When was the last major airline downed by a pilot error stall anyway?

<comment><USER18> The pilots of both Air France 447 and Colgan Air 3407 managed to stall perfectly serviceable aircraft in 2009, killing 277 combined.

<comment><USER17> Exactly my point -- we've just seen 346 people killed by (presumably) an anti- stall system -- when it's been a decade since we've had the problem this system is meant to prevent.

<comment><USER18> If the 737 MAX anti-stall system has a flaw of course it should be fixed. That's hardly an argument against anti-stall systems in general. The accidents prevented by anti-stall systems don't make the news.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> It does look possible that the anti-stalling software new to these planes has a bug.

<comment><USER20> I hesitate to even say something, in deference to the much more knowledgeable folks working this at the NTSB and sister agencies right now.

But I'd be surprised if it were that simple, especially given the airtime of all planes flown. Airtime which I'd assume passed largely without incident, as by now some news agency should have drug up any similar close calls.

If we're doing wild speculation, I'd bet on something like the Tesla battery punctures (where it turned out high-energy impacts from pointed road debris were more common than expected).

E.g. a maintenance issue, coupled with a specific configuration, coupled with pilot behavior

Or, it could just be a poorly maintained plane and a freak accident. But that's what root cause analysis and black box recordings are designed to ascertain.</comment></comment>


Show HN: PhotoKlash – Apples to Apples meets SnapChat in my new app - <AUTHOR> http://play.photoklash.com

<comment><USER2> Actually an interesting idea. It's so hard to come up with an online service these days that would wrangle user engagement so well done for trying.

Perhaps on the website give some examples of this (can't see in the slideshow). If you have some examples of it working then it might give more impetus to download it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback. We tried to keep the slideshow more focused as a tutorial of sorts. But adding the user side of why you should play and what benefit you get is a good idea.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hey everyone, I am the lead dev for this app. Let me know any feedback or if you have any comments.</comment>


Skeuomorphism is the easy way out - <AUTHOR> http://blog.wells.ee/skeuomorphism

<comment><USER3> Skeumorphism is no more an "easy way out" than black Helvetica on a white background is an "easy way out". They can both be used appropriately, or used badly and in excess.

The address book in OSX is an example of bad skeumorphism -- it's a fake book with pages that don't actually turn, trying to shoehorn "advanced" computer technology into a visual representation that doesn't work. It's a bad metaphor, a bad analogy. It confuses more than it helps.

The "Notes" application on OSX is a fantastic use of skeumorphism. The legal- pad look shows us at a glance that it's for taking notes, which a plain white background wouldn't do. The analogy between individual note documents and pages is perfect. Anyone can use it instantly, without worrying where documents are saved or anything like that.

The fundamental question is, are design choices helping or hindering understandability and usability? Apps and the web have evolved conventions like share icons and tabs and underlined/colored links, etc. which people understand. Skeumorphism just adds vocabulary from the physical world to the toolbox.

And in the opposite direction of skeumorphism, I think the SVBTLE blog platform itself goes too far to the minimalist. I can't tell people's blogs apart, because they all look virtually identical -- that's bad design. And what the heck is the "kudos nipple"? Why do you hover instead of clicking? A simple thumbs-up icon would be understandable by everyone, which is almost skeumorphic in its own way, since it refers to a physical thumbs-up... Reference to the physical world can be a very useful thing.

<comment><USER4> I'd agree that the address book skeumorphism is a pretty terrible option - seems to be more about design bling than addressing usabiblity. OTOH the "head-shaking" of the OSX login window when you enter a bad password is some of the best skeumorphism I've seen, and yet there are no visual design elements (like putting ears on the window or something.)

<comment><USER5> That .. and the sleep LED that "breathes". The lock that shows in system preferences that need admin permissions is also a good one I think.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Bashing skeuomorphism is the easy way out.

Non physical affordances don't come easy, and like it or not our brains are trained in a world of 3 dimensions made of matter. Dieter Rams built things around their functional components, the materials available and the other constraints given to him by a physical world.

Edward Tufte preaches that content rules and all else is extra. We can certainly minimize everything that isn't the focus, we should, after all. But abandoning the lessons from skueomorphism really means you are throwing out every hint of natural world affordances in your interfaces. The first 3 dimensional shading or shadow and you have veered into the land of skeuomorphism - and that's ok, because a world of flat squares with Helvetica labels takes a whole lot more mental cycles to process than that beveled 3d button, and it always will.

I look forward to seeing what you are doing with kicksend- with or without hints of the physical world.

<comment><USER7> "...a world of flat squares with Helvetica labels takes a whole lot more mental cycles to process than that beveled 3d button, and it always will."

Do you have a citation for that? I'm genuinely interested in reading more about it, because it seems somewhat counter-intuitive. The idea that simpler shapes would be harder to process visually is very fascinating to me.

<comment><USER6> Its not that a simpler shape isn't easier to process, its that its harder to infer purpose when there is so little information (like in the case of Metro). A button is something that needs to be 'pressed' so it should look like it can be- and by doing so you understand that it is a button much faster.

Donald Norman and Jakob Neilsen have long preached this and they have a bunch of info on affordances and why they work: <http://www.jnd.org/dn.mss/affordances_and.html>

More recently see Steve Krug's "Don't Make Me Think"

<comment><USER7> Interesting, though I have to wonder if that's necessarily true; it seems that you could designate a button using only rectangles and solid colors in a way that would be clear and unambiguous (e.g. Google+'s buttons). Either way, interesting application of Norman's ideas of 'affordances.' DoET is a perennial favorite of mine.

<comment><USER8> >(e.g. Google+'s buttons)

They actually have slightly rounded corners, an outline and subtle gradient going from top to bottom that hint at three dimensionality and offers affordance. There's also a slight darkening on mouse-over which suggests they're interactive and can be pressed in.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> No.

No, no, no, no, no.

Idiotic design decisions like this are why computers have long been the province of mathematicians, scientists, programmers, and other eggheads.

Sheuomorphism is the RIGHT way out -- if you are designing for the general mass of human beings. I happen to know personally the designer of one of the first pieces of personal finance software -- "Electric Checkbook" for Macintosh. (There's a site going by that name that appears to have been started by his son.) It was the template from which Quicken was largely derived, but that's a long, sad, and dirty story.

The advantage of Electric Checkbook over any of the competition, its creator told me, was implicit in the name: it literally worked just like a checkbook with on-screen checks you fill out and an option to print your electronic checks as real checks. It was far easier and more comfortable to use than any of the professional accounting systems out there because it offered the average user the comfort of the familiar.

That Apple successfully deploys skeuomorphism in order to make its average user base feel at ease is a big part of why they're so much better than any other tech company out there. So what if iBooks looks just like a bookshelf, to no functional use whatever. It helps avid readers get into the reading zone, giving them a bit of the joy of perusing their favorite real bookshelves. And that's an edge over the competition.

And no, Microsoft Bob didn't lose because of skeuomorphism. Microsoft Bob lost because it was tacky.

<comment><USER10> Skeuomorphism unnecessarily constrains software design to the realm of real- world analogue. It completely breaks down when applied to concepts which do not fit. How do you create a skeuomorphic interface for something like Git? The answer is: you don't.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> "Skeuomorphism helps people misunderstand the capabilities and limitations of digital products based on their understanding of a physical analog."

Right. Nothing sets hard limits in a user's mind then guiding them to use a piece of software through a terribly flawed metaphor. My father learned to use computers in the mid-90s when he was in his 60s and his chosen tool was MS- Excel as it most closely represented the ledger system he used to keep his books with (which is of course what spreadsheets were intended for in the first place).

His world turned upside-down when I showed him that he could also do his production planning (he ran a small manufacturer) with it. Instead of painstakingly drawing the production schedule grid for the next day by hand, moving jobs from one day to the next, assigning employees to tasks and machines, etc. Spending 6 out of his 12 hour work day on it. He could do the entire job in an hour in Excel, and it was more flexible and he could make mid-day changes and print the schedules out with just a few minutes of moving cells around.

It blew his mind. He had been thinking of Excel only as a digital ledge, but now he thought of it as a giant grid. Soon he was mocking up purchase orders sheets, tracking suppliers, handling expense reports, doing inventory management, past-job database (with prices and pointers to physical samples in an organized warehouse) and other sorts of probably inappropriate tasks that simply required a grid layout and some basic content to frame the use-case.

What was important was breaking him out of the metaphor and suddenly he found a kind of self-actualization that freed him of hours and hours of hand written paperwork. It transformed his business and allowed him to handle quite a bit more business than he could before. His digital records were so good that when he sold his company he figures that it added 20-30% to the asking price for the company. If Excel has been even _more_ skeuomorphic of a book keeping ledger, with stitched binding and a traditional two or three column ledger, he may never have been able to break free of that metaphor and realize his other efficiencies.

[http://chestofbooks.com/finance/banking/Money-And-Banking- Ho...](http://chestofbooks.com/finance/banking/Money-And-Banking- Holdsworth/images/Three-column-Ledger.png)

<comment><USER6> Did he use grid paper to do the schedule? Excel is really not very skeuomorphic. One variation on being _more_ skeuomorphic would be that it came with various templates one of which looked like a typical work schedule sheet, but leveraged excel's strengths of automatic calculation. That skeuomorphic move would have helped him realize the possibilities and he could have achieved self actualization and gotten that extra 20-30% without your help.

<comment><USER11> Originally he did. It was a large format, expensive custom grid paper designed for the kind of old fashioned production scheduling he used to do.

In general it was a grid, but the cells weren't square, they were wider so that there was more room to write, and along the top and left side were various specialty cells for tracking schedule numbers, days of production, reference numbers, various call-outs and along the left side room for specific machines and machine operators to be inserted. He used a fairly sophisticated color coding sytem to show linked jobs as they moved through the queue and hopped machines, so a red diagonally striped cell on one machine represented the same job later in the day on another machine also using a red diagonally striped cell. It basically allowed him to plan execution of production pipelines similar to thread execution on a modern day processor.

He had to hand draw the legend on every sheet and all of the setup. And since it was all pens and markers and such, a small mistake meant redrawing the entire schedule. I remember growing up watching him sit in front of the TV working on his production schedules late into the night.

I agree that Excel in general is not terribly skeuomorphic, but like I said elsewhere in this comment, skeuomorphism is a gradient and Excel was just similar enough to a paper book-keeping ledger of old that he thought that it would only be useful to him in that sense never realizing it could replace the custom production schedule grid he managed until quite a bit later.

 _edit_ it was not too entirely different from this

[http://preoccupiedbymoonlight.blogspot.com/2010/06/productio...](http://preoccupiedbymoonlight.blogspot.com/2010/06/production- schedule.html)

only quite a bit more complex and larger format, and in the end looked almost calico colored there were so many production pipelines at once on it (vs. this example with only one real pipeline)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The designer / minimalist half of me eschews ornamentation – I'm a big fan of the "swiss style". But, for all the recent ragging on skeuomorphism, there are times when it is appropriate. When we released polychord 2 with its dark leather and chrome look, it was in response to feedback from lots of our users who wanted something that fit in with their studio gear. We resisted the urge to use 'knobs' and other physical gadgets that would mess up the UX. It's just a skin, but it made a lot of our users happy. I also observed that the new physical hints made the app less threatening for new users to jump in and start playing around.

<comment><USER13> I just looked at some Polychord screenshots and it looks great, nothing like the bizarre garish skins of iPad contacts or iMovie.

Good work.

<comment><USER12> Thanks! We hired Jonas Eriksson (<http://erikssonjonas.com/>) to do the redesign.

<comment><USER13> It seems like the lesson here is that Skeuomorphism is OK if you're modeling it after something that is gorgeous and tactile to begin with. Not all real- world objects are things that I even care to interact with in the real-world.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Ah, the old HN switch-a-roo! Everybody loves skeuomorphism right now.

Skeuomorphic designs certainly have their place and help affordance and recognition, and the author seems to acknowledge that. The point he is trying to make is that skeuomorphism is an easy way _to make a UI look good_ , and toss more functional concerns aside; I agree completely.

</comment><comment><USER15> Hit the (skeuomorphic) nail on the head.

There are many forms of skeuomorphism, and it's important to distinguish them from each other. Visual kitsch is cheap in a different way to outdated metaphors that hold back the possibilities of digital product design; a well- used affordance should not be dismissed because of its visual design and neither should a beautiful piece of 'Photoshop art' be allowed to get away with broken & confusing metaphors.

\- Visual kitsch the crap on Dribbble that throws in random textures for the hell of it, no match-up to a real-life object. No particularly jarring interactions, just looks tacky. I guess Find My Friends goes here?

\- Visual kitsch, broken interaction iCal, iBooks, Address Book etc - <USER2> kitsch and an interaction skeuomorph. Pages not swiping properly in Contacts/Address Book (and having scrollable UITableViews on a piece of 'paper'), full stack of pages left at the end of an iBook, iCal 'tearing pages off' but then they're still there when you swipe back etc.

\- No visual skeuomorph, just interaction skeuomorph (not so bad) Google Calendar - one month per page rather than an infinite scroll (ala Calvetica). An easy 'affordance', but holding interaction design back nonetheless.

\- Visual kitsch, non-broken interaction skeuomorph Remember that hyper- realistic eBook reader a couple of months ago? Relative to iBooks the interactions actually matched up - the stack of pages on the right hand side of the page decreased the further you went into the book. It afford familiarity without being damaging and confusing like iBooks and Contacts, but it was still a weak grasp at the past.

\- Outdated metaphors Newsstand on iPad upsets me. We have a fantastic platform capable of totally redefining how we consume content and we present magazines & newspapers as 1:1 icons of their printed counterparts on shelves? I wrote more about this here: [http://designedbygold.com/2011/10/the- metaphors-breaking-the...](http://designedbygold.com/2011/10/the-metaphors- breaking-the-future/)

This isn't to say die-hard modernism is the way forward - I have my doubts about Metro too. It's just posturing; even Jan Tschichold said that typography should bear the hallmark of it's age (and strict Swiss design definitely isn't a product of 2012).

This does mean that skeuomorphism and as-it-was-in-print modernism are both wrong, but I think we knew that anyway. What we need is an appropriate visual- and interaction-design language for the times. One rooted in tactility; one that learns from the past but doesn't replicate it.

</comment><comment><USER16> I love this about designers - they are so passionate and so _convinced_ about the latest design fad, when in reality the only constant is change.

People just like "new" things ... one season its faux leather, another season its gray Helvetica on stark white.

<comment><USER17> best comment in this entire thread. thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Using a computer to do the things we normally do, e.g., sending bits to each other, requires that we adopt metaphors. Even something as basic as a "email" is a metaphor.

How long does it take to learn a new metaphor? How difficult is it?

It's far easier to just stick with the metaphors you already know. And that is, I think, what "most" people do.

This applies to more than just computers.

"Some" people might like to keep trying new metaphors every week. Who knows?

One thing is for sure. Everyone learns the "email" metaphor.

Not just some people. Everyone. Food for thought.

I think the author is spot on when he says that in this context (computers) metaphors create limitations rather than educating people about what computers can really do. I even see this among developers who, one would think, are the people resposnible for enabling users to unlock the full potential of their computers. They are stuck on certain metaphors which limit what they can imagine and therefore implement. Independent thinking and striving for originality are in short supply among developers. The attack of the clones never ceases, in case, clones of whatever developers see other developers have done.

However, as insightful as the reference to "skeudomorphism" may be, it's clear the author's goal with this post is trying to downplay Kicksend competitors. Maybe ones that are styled like Instagram? (Polaroid metaphor?)

How many hoops does someone have to jump through to use Kicksend versus using something like Instagram/Facebook (for lack of better examples)? And do they have to pay for the "service"? Maybe that could be a factor?

<comment><USER19> I don't think everyone learns email as a metaphor though.

While I'm old enough to have sent and received paper mail as a means of communication, it's highly likely that my toddler will have sent email (and internalized the concept) before having interacted with physical mail systems. It's a metaphor for _us_ to call it email but it's a vestigial name to the younger generations.

Think of the floppy disk being a metaphor for saving a file. Few people younger than 15 have used a floppy drive but manage to save files regardless. I also understood radio buttons on web forms as exclusive selections as a young person even though I didn't know it was a metaphor for real buttons on old car radios until a couple of years ago.

<comment><USER18> But a floppy disk is not a metaphor. The metaphor is a "file" as a description for a series of electromagetic charges on a floppy disk.

It is indeed interesting that children may likely interact with email before postal mail. But postal mail shows no signs of disappearing anytime soon. Probably not during your lifetime and the lifetime of your startup while you're acquiring a critical mass of users.

Do you think it will be possible to conduct 100% of your affairs in life without ever sending or receiving postal mail? That postal mail will never be used by anyone you transact with?

No doubt we may someday reach a "paperless" world where all your affairs can be handled without every using postal mail. And where people never ever use postal mail and have no reason to even know of its existence. Maybe your children may see this come to pass.

But for the purposes of your startup, is that day something you should be concerned about? Is your target market toddlers? Or people old enough to have credit cards, today? People who know how to use email.

<comment><USER20> I also started using radio buttons long before I learned that they were based on car radios, and once I did so I didn't suddenly start thinking of the buttons as metaphorical; it's just an interesting fact to me. And though I did use floppy disks when I was younger, the idea of a floppy disk no longer even enters my mind when I look for the floppy disk icon; it's just an arbitrary recognizable shape. (The metaphor is "save to floppy disk" as "save to any drive".)

This matters mainly because I won't be bothered if either control starts acting in a way that breaks the metaphor, like a save icon that saves to the cloud (no need to carry a disk around) or a radio button with a design that looks nothing like a car radio (like the current design, as best as I can tell). And it's not black and white: though I've always known a folder is based on a filing cabinet, I've never been bothered that they can be infinitely nested. The more people are familiar with the "metaphor", the less it's necessary to stick to purely metaphorical elements.

<comment><USER18> I think icons can be arbitrary. That's because I've seen some that are so obviously idiosyncratic to the developer; they bear no relation to the function that I can decipher. Some of them I can't even tell what the heck they are. "WTF is that supposed to be?" It's like your example of the floppy. It's a rectangle. It means save. Does it matter if no one even knows what the heck the icon is supposed to represent? If it's not intuitive? For the first few minutes perhaps until I figure out what the program it represents actually does it matters. Maybe it gives me a clue maybe not. From then on, once I figure it out, it's irrelevant.

This is one of the 1001 reasons I think GUI's are a waste of time. I can just as easily tell a user to hit a particular key (i.e. a tactile button) or type "save". Goodbye ambiguity.

Are icons metaphors? Or are they just symbols?

I am not a linguist but I think that you may be stretching the definition of metapahor if you are thinking of icons as themselves being metaphors.

What is an icon? A button with a superimposed symbol?

Now, if you are saying buttons on a computer screen (which do not necessarily need any symbol superimposed on them to work) are metaphors for physical buttons, e.g. like your example of radio buttons, then that seems a little more reasonable.

I've seen early TV remote controls, 8-tracks and various other old things having push-in buttons just like car radios. I'm not sure car radios were the first to have these. Maybe early radios, before TV, were the first to have push-in buttons (or whatever the proper name for them is)?

<comment><USER21> Typing "save" is very far from being unambiguous though. Should it be "save", "store", "write down", "file away", "preserve" or another one of a few dozen ways an unsuspecting person could come up with? Should you type "please" too? At least with GUI there is a button that semi-obviously can be clicked, even if it is unclear what it does. Discoverability is way better with GUI.

<comment><USER18> What you find ambiguous may not align with what others find ambiguous. You, as a nerd, know there are many options that "save" could entail. Does everyone else know that?

What if a user has no idea about "save options". To them "save" might just mean "save". That is, they want to be able to retrieve it later.

If I say to you "Jump!", you might ask "How high?" Others might just jump. Should we enlist some participants in a study and see what most people do? Let's ask people what "save" means. Then let's show them a button and ask them what it means.

Why does some software have an option to "show button text"? Why would anyone want to see text on a button? Why would anyone want that?

I wish there was a way I could post to HN in a series of buttons, like hieroglyphics. It would be "way better" than using words. You could click on them and they would bounce up and down. Way better than reading.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> At this point, I get the feeling that "skeuomorphism" is a broad sweeping category label created without enough cohesiveness within the category. Doing so urges discussions to assign properties to "skeuomorphism" (is bad, is good, is the way, etc.) without mention of the context in which a designer chose the approach in a particular case.

Such a category label not only results in quick evaluations of the kind "x is skeuomorphic and skeuomorphic is bad design, therefore x is bad design", it also urges analytical errors of the kind "design x isn't working, x is skeuomorphic, x is probably not working _because_ it is skeuomorphic". Enthusiasts may also tend to use "no true Scotsman" kind of arguments to evaluate whether a design is _really_ skeuomorphic.

What would serve us better is to catalog designs that are considered skeuomorphic, evaluate each based on whether it works for the user, and then evaluate whether the category label is worth the number of letters in the word or whether its definition needs to be narrowed in order to make it useful in design discussions.

</comment><comment><USER22> I'd argue that people generally have an underlying expectation that they'll be able to do far more on the internet with web apps than with physical mediums. If that is true, then having elements from the real world into web apps _does_ promote a sense of familiarity and an intuitive understanding of, at the very least, how to get started.

</comment><comment><USER23> There's bad skeuomorphism, and there's good skeuomorphism. In the end of the day, it's a personal option, and it really depends on the type of product/site/interface you're designing.

I've designed a mobile application that is skeuomorphic, with the intent to resemble the original one, being this one of the goals of my client, and I justify it well enough to make sense. Even though it's a skeumorph looking app, not really a skeuomorph interface.

But you must admit, skeuomorph isn't that bad when used properly and with caution. There are some good uses to it. And I don't like extremes, I'm not with the "Skeuomorph all the things" team, and neither with the "Skeuomorph is evil", because I believe there's a time and place to everything, but it must be used with obvious moderation.

</comment><comment><USER24> Skeuomorphism is important, necessary even. The issue is that people are conflating it with nostalgia.

An interface can be considered skeuomorphic if it provides affordances that are useful in the physical world - shadows, shapes and animations based on the laws of physics. Such an interface provides the necessary clues to tell a user _how_ to interact with its elements.

Nostalgia serves another purpose. It creates an association between a common old interface, and the new one. It provides the clues as to _why_ the user should interact with its elements.

I would argue that skeuomorphism is not the easy way out, its the right way. Nostalgia is a much more likely candidate for being the path of least resistance. Because the alternative is education.

</comment><comment><USER25> TAKE THE EASY WAY OUT.

Have you ever watched a show like Kitchen Nightmares (or the many other variants now)? It's a show where a famous chef (Gordon Ramsay) comes into a restaurant in trouble and rescues it. Easily 90% of the stuff he does is just the basics. Clean things up, keep the decor up to date (and also clean), keep the menu small and packed with high quality items, etc. None of it is rocket surgery, but so many restaurants fail at such things.

And the same is true everywhere. Whether it's in online businesses, the UX for applications, or software architecture.

I highly recommend to everyone to take the easy way out first. Keep things simple, keep things clean, do the obvious thing at every step. Chances are this will lead to success and it will give you the ability to maybe try some less obvious things in the future.

</comment><comment><USER26> I think he misses the point here that 'people like to have fun'. We know that skeumorphic designs aren't the most efficient and in some cases may confuse the user. But these apps aren't being used to control a spaceship. They are often used in the 5 min gap between meetings or on the train where a tiny sliver of fun is perfect.

Whereas when I look at something like Kicksend it's just another boring, stale and uninspired photo site. And yes, it may 'get the job done' better but if I am not enjoying using it then why not use something that does.

And that really is the crux of the argument here. You have a tiny window of opportunity to convince a person to keep an app before they will simply delete it and find something else.

<comment><USER27> You can maybe lure people in with nice marketing, packaging or a fun interface, but in the end you want users who stick around.

If you think about apps the most every day, they're quite plain or unfun. They're maybe pleasant, probably effective, and you use them to get things done.</comment></comment>


'Wolf of Wall Street' warns of impending cryptocurrencies 'scam' - <AUTHOR> https://www.ft.com/content/739f8954-b61a-11e7-a398-73d59db9e399 <comment><USER2> When a scammer calls something a scam, isn't it really an endorsement?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Non-paywall link: [https://archive.fo/MdvkL](https://archive.fo/MdvkL)</comment>


Backlash has begun against gluten-free dieters - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/backlash-has-begun-against-gluten-free-dieters/2014/07/06/61953aba-f7be-11e3-a3a5-42be35962a52_story.html?wpsrc=AG0003357 <comment><USER2> The rise of gluten-free dieting as a fad has some interesting effects for people who actually have celiac disease or gluten sensitivity. On the one hand, increased awareness has made gluten-free food more available, on the other, the stigma against people eating gluten-free has risen. So people who have an actual medical reason not to eat gluten get lumped into a fad diet group.

I have a friend with Hashimoto's Thyroiditis. In recent years several studies have found a potential connection between Hashimoto's and celiac disease (it is still being actively studied, and the link is not conclusive), and so some doctors are beginning to suggest that people with Hashimoto's remove gluten from their diet. My friend did, and sure enough saw some thyroid improvement afterward. She is now entirely gluten free (and has been for over a year), and is often irritated at people judging or questioning her gluten-free diet because they immediately assume it is nothing more than capitulation to an idiotic fad.

<comment><USER3> >She is now entirely gluten free (and has been for over a year), and is often irritated at people judging or questioning her gluten-free diet because they immediately assume it is nothing more than capitulation to an idiotic fad.

She shouldn't be, because 99 times out of 100, it is nothing more than that. It's a fine fad, though, because it doesn't harm the sensitive dears who have taken it up, and it brings a massive array of options for people whose diets were extremely limited before.

If somebody can come up with an anti-peanut dust fad, I'd support that too.

<comment><USER4> The issue, though, is when restaurants, grocers, etc. mistake a legitimate medical condition with a trendy fad diet and not take one's gluten-free requirements seriously (e.g. not paying attention to sources of gluten cross- contamination, or not paying attention to which ingredients actually have gluten). They _should_ be erring on the safe side and assuming that all requests for gluten-free are due to a medical condition requiring it, but when the number of gluten-free fad dieters vastly exceeds the number of people who actually _need_ a gluten-free diet, the likelihood of safe-side erring decreases without some other reason (like stronger requirements for "gluten- free" foods, including both ingredient _and_ preparation standards).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The anti-gluten free diet people drive me nuts! No one is forcing anyone to go gluten free.

I had dinner last night with friends, one of who has had really bad allergies for many years. Really bad. Starting a year ago, her doctor started removing things from her environment to see what might be causing the problem. You guessed it: when gluten was removed from her diet her allergies cleared up within a month.

My wife and I eat mostly gluten free because we believe that modern wheat (which is really a different food now) causes inflammation in some people. I spend zero time trying to get anyone else to go gluten free, because except for my family I don't much care what other people eat.

So, if you like wheat products, enjoy!

BTW, you have not seen the new documentary "Fed Up" about the food industry then please do so. This is the movie the food industry (super powerful lobby in the USA, probably even more clout than the defense industry) does not want to see, so you may have to exert extra effort to find it playing.

<comment><USER6> > _This is the movie the food industry_

The "food industry"? You mean the same one that's slapping "gluten free" labels on anything and everything, while upping the price to take advantage of all these fad followers?

Yeah, I'm sure they are devastated. This is a food marketers dream.

<comment><USER5> The way to go gluten free is to make your own food, mainly fresh vegetables, fruit, and some high quality meat. Maybe it is just my tastes, but getting carbohydrates from cauliflower, carrots, yams, etc. is just tastier.

But yes, I agree with you that the food industrial complex has jumped all over the gluten free trend.

<comment><USER7> > fresh vegetables, fruit, and some high quality meat

the food industry sells you all of those things...

<comment><USER4> That's because "the food industry" is a ridiculously-nebulous term, kind of like "terrorism". It's vague to the point of being misleading, since it ends up including big and small players alike without further qualification (and at that point, you might as well be picking a more descriptive term).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> In the months since I was diagnosed with celiac disease, I have almost eliminated restaurant meals from my lifestyle. Regardless of whether the wait staff are visibly hostile toward my request for gluten-free food, I usually become sick after the rare occasion when I do eat out. I know that I should eliminate restaurants entirely but it's difficult to wholly pull away from the shared experience of food with friends.

Far more frustrating is the experience of shopping in the grocery store. Though I've been told by a dozen people that I have it so good since there are so many gluten-free foods, easily 4 out of every 5 foods labeled as gluten- free also mention in fine print that they are manufactured in a facility that processes wheat, which is unsafe for celiac sufferers. Even the upcoming FDA standard of <20 ppm may be enough to cause problems in those with celiac disease.

It is a wonderful thing that strictly avoiding gluten has mostly ended the constant migraines of the past 15 years that inspired my username here. Though it's a surprise whenever I get glutened and the migraine returns with a vengeance.

<comment><USER9> "I have almost eliminated restaurant meals from my lifestyle"

My son has medically diagnosed celiac and we've had excellent luck at salad bars and grilled food (steak dinner hold the garlic bread) and also buffets.

The, uh, explosive effect out both ends, often simultaneously, is rather noticeable so we're pretty confident the food is "clean" and have had pretty good results.

Avoiding soy sauce seems harder than avoiding wheat. You know whats in soy sauce other than soy, right?

On one hand, the fad is cool because there's megatons of doubly fake food available at high expense, where its fake processed food to begin with, then fake - fake food because they took the wheat out. So its a fake version of fake food. The problem is lets be blunt here, it tastes pretty awful and its not good for you anyway. You wanna go GF my advice is eat a salad or a steak not an awful simulation of fake wonder bread that tastes like compressed sawdust mixed with potato peelings. I don't even have words to describe the fake GF brownie mix my wife made one time, warm road tar mixed with sand and dog droppings? You wanna eat something unhealthy for desert get a quart of organic fruit juice and a home ice cream maker and make a slushy, if you're going to eat something unhealthy at least let it taste good.

I've had this argument quite a few times with my son which when paraphrased is something like, dad why do we have to eat this icky fake lasagna with icky fake garlic bread and then have icky fake apple pie when I loved the grilled homemade honey mustard chicken breasts and a light salad from last night, dad? Dad's homemade stir fries are awesome how come we're stuck eating burgers on icky fake buns tonight? (you can make stir fries without soy sauce...)

<comment><USER8> I know that most soy sauces have wheat in them.

Maybe once I've had more time post-diagnosis, I'll trust salad bars again, but shortly after my biopsy confirmed that I have celiac, I ate at a salad bar and was sick for days.

Far more insidious and scary are lentils, which should be fine, but are often processed with barley, or anything in the bulk section of the grocery store. My wallet certainly wishes that I could buy from bulk bins again.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The biggest problem with the fad of people going on gluten-free diets?

It means that people become careless - when they encounter someone who actually has celiac disease, they are less likely to treat it seriously.

(Case in point: the guy at the grocer's who repeatedly insisted to a celiac friend of mine that durum semolina pasta was gluten-free.)

<comment><USER11> Yes. My 6 y/o son has celiac and this is by far the biggest issue now. The awareness of what gluten actually is is nice, but the default assumption is now that it's someone who's voluntarily dieting, which can create some bad situations. We always make it a point at restaurants to not simply inquire about GF, but emphasize that our son has celiac in the hopes that they think, "Oh, this isn't some lame fad dieter, I need to really ask the chef about this."

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Interestingly all the latest research has been pointing to another culprit (FODMAPs) in those claiming non-celiac gluten sensitivity. Some relevant links:

[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23648697](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23648697)

[http://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2014/05/gluten_sensitiv...](http://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2014/05/gluten_sensitivity_may_not_exist.html)

</comment><comment><USER13> Fascinating relevant article: [http://www.motherjones.com/tom- philpott/2014/02/toms-kitchen...](http://www.motherjones.com/tom- philpott/2014/02/toms-kitchen-100-whole-wheat-bread-doesnt-suck-and-pretty- easy)

TL;DR - The baking industry is using techniques which cause bread to rise so fast that the yeast does not have time to process the gluten. Slower/traditional techniques & rise-times do. The apparent rise in "gluten sensitivity" is consequential to the change from reducing bread rise times from hours to minutes; those who were sensitive (not to the degree of Celiac sufferers) were not exposed to gluten so much in the past because rise times gave yeast a chance to eliminate the problem. Those who are now "gluten sensitive" should try the very slow bread recipe in the article (and everyone else too, it's delicious).

<comment><USER14> > Those who are now "gluten sensitive" should try the very slow bread recipe > in the article (and everyone else too, it's delicious).

This is a bad idea. If the gluten sensitive individual, which you obviously don't believe in, is having an autoimmune reaction the immune system will kick in. IIRC, it can kick in for 5ng of active material, roughly the same amount of active agent in a vaccine, and will remain active for months.

<comment><USER13> _which you obviously don 't believe in_

Huh? I'm relaying a way for the gluten sensitive to remove gluten using classic methods to avoid the autoimmune reaction, observing that modern rapid- rise baking leaves an overwhelming amount of gluten intact. Hardly a statement of "I don't believe in it". The information may be imperfect as I'm presenting it; I'm presenting suggestions & insights, not peer-reviewed research of encyclopedic depth.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Don't lump all the "me too" gluten-free'ers together. Yes, some are glomming on to a fad, but just because you are not a cileac dosen't mean you're silly for going gluten-free (GF).

Irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) -- a common functional gastrointestinal disorder (FGID) affecting one in seven -- has been shown to be exacerbated by FODMAPs[1][2] in wheat. It's easy to avoid FODMAPs by going GF and thus suffer less from IBS.

A lot of IBS suffers are just not explaining that they are avoiding FODMAPs by going GF.

\----

[1]: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FODMAP](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FODMAP)

[2]: [http://www.med.monash.edu/cecs/gastro/fodmap/](http://www.med.monash.edu/cecs/gastro/fodmap/)

</comment><comment><USER16> > "In the '50s, everyone had ulcers"

Yeah, because we hadn't discovered H Pylori as a causative agent and developed treatments.

> "Then, it was back problems"

Because manual labor in blue collar work was a lot more common back then.

<comment><USER17> Non specific lower back pain used to be treated with bed rest and firmer mattresses.

Now we know those are both bad things. When you lie on your bed you want to be able to slide your hand, with a little bit of effort, under your spine at your lower back.

We also know that carefully taking pain relief and keeping the back moving helps, as does specific exercise to strengthen the muscles.

Plenty of white collar workers have non specific lower back pain and spending hundreds of dollars on chairs may help, but exercise will help more.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> My roommate called gluten free food "liberal bullshit" when he saw me eating (corn) tortilla chips marked as gluten free. He said his bag of chips tastes better, even though his was gluten free too!

There is a convergence of fad diets - gluten free and no carb. Going gluten free is also very compatible with a paleo diet. You can do two or three fad diets at the same time! Was there this much backlash to other fad diets like south beach or Atkins? I really can't recall...

Looking back at what I eat all week, outside of beer and the odd slice of pizza here and there. My diet is basically gluten free and I'm not even trying. Many "gluten free" bashers might be surprised to learn the same thing!

<comment><USER19> Personally? Yes, fad diets have always been this annoying. I admittedly have some... interesting extended family who decides that each fad diet/medical practice is EXACTLY what applies to their children at that moment, and with a doctor in my part of the family, we get to hear _all_ about it. (before long I'm half expecting her to call up ABSOLUTELY POSITIVE that they all have dysentery after a bad evening of taco bell.)

Should "the fandom ruin it for everyone"? No, probably not. But they certainly make it hard not not want to bang your head against something really hard. I don't care about liberal bullshit, conservative bullshit, I just care about bullshit. And if your best reason for being sure that you have something is "my symptoms match what the man on fox news told me about so I self diagnosed"... When I figure out how to type out the teeth grinding noise that sentence just made me create, I'll update this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Foolishness on multiple fronts.

It's just a matter of time, the nice thing about fads is that they disappear even faster than they appear in the first place. Ten years ago 'atkins' vanished overnight and it looks like 'gluten free' has already peaked [1].

Also, while were on the topic of diet gripes - mine is vegetarianism. I've been a vegetarian my entire life and faced all the same sort of nonsense as it has risen in popularity. Thankfully, I can pretty easily smell meats and wouldn't face anything worst than indigestion for accidentally eating some.

1: [http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q='gluten%20free'%2C%20...](http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q='gluten%20free'%2C%20'atkins%20diet'&cmpt=q)

</comment><comment><USER21> What is more strange is actually having other food allergies. I have bad Oral Allergy Syndrome, and eating various things like cantaloupe, bananas, avocado, grapes (and wine), among other things, make me sick, some worse than others. Included with that is a mild latex allergy.

So people, especially health food nuts,tend to thing I'm a weird, unhealthy bitch when I tell them I can't eat banana or fruit salad. I sucked it up recently and ate a few bananas and two days in a row had to keep myself from vomiting. Same with wine: I've had a single glass of wine before and vomited later that night. Avocado doesn't give me the indigestion but it does make my mouth and throat very itchy, but I still tend to eat it.

</comment><comment><USER22> People are different - who guessed.

The two main problems are:

1) Popular science & media don't understand how the gut works enough to actually give beneficial advice en-masse.

2) The 'Fad' is the food industry selling even more processed junk under the moniker of 'Gluten Free' in the same way that 'Low Fat' and 'Sugar Free' foods are often worse overall nutritionally than those they replace.

As usual, the elephant in the room is how there's no real downside to a sugar- free diet, but the food industry don't want that as food isn't as addictive.

</comment><comment><USER23> A hypothesis I saw on HN a while ago about the rise in gluten intolerance(+) was that it was actually something else: some other change in the protein composition of wheat (due to GM or hybridization) or its chemical composition after processing is what people are allergic to.

(+)Or at least people reporting health benefits after cutting gluten, and therefore wheat, out of their diet.

Edit: meanwhile someone has posted it to this thread [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8009766](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8009766)

</comment><comment><USER24> I find this suspicion suspicious. I know that some people are melodramatic about it, but why can't people just have their food without gluten if they don't want it? Nobody ever backlashed against the anti-MSG thing, and that was arguably way dumber.

On the other hand, I have heard that this has resulted in lowering of standards for handling gluten, and people who are severely allergic are being exposed to small amounts, while people without celiac don't notice those small amounts. So, that's bad.

<comment><USER25> Yes, these lowering standards cause by people not really allergic is a problem.

I have the same problem with my son having multiple allergies (real severe ones) is that the employees think when you say you're allergic that your just being fussy and that just removing something from the top of the dish is OK.

But in any case, it hard to trust restaurants at all on these matters.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Much of the "increased energy levels" that people report from excluding gluten probably has to do with the fact that gluten elimination diets often end up having a lower glycemic index. Most gluten sources are high in carbohydrates, specifically _processed_ carbohydrates. Eating lots of processed carbohydrates spikes your blood sugar giving you short-term energy, but makes you tired once the sugar is removed from your blood stream.

Gluten free diets often end up being higher in raw foods simply out of convenience, since most of the gluten free food items you can buy at the store are things like nuts, vegetables and the like. While gluten free dieting may be a fad that is annoying to your friends, the end result is that the majority of food people avoid is stuff they probably shouldn't eat that much of in the first place.

<comment><USER27> I think the effect you describe is the primary reason why gluten-free is so effective for most (but definitely not all) people. Replacing a cookie with a piece of fruit is a good idea no matter what diet you're on.

The gluten free fad has made it so easy to find gluten-free cookies et al that the effect you describe much less significant.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Gluten destroyed my life and nearly killed me in the end (DH). My live could have been very different with a gluten free diet. I have become very septic about it in general

[http://perfecthealthdiet.com/category/toxins-and- toxicity/wh...](http://perfecthealthdiet.com/category/toxins-and- toxicity/wheat-grains/) [http://perfecthealthdiet.com/2010/09/wheat-and- obesity-more-...](http://perfecthealthdiet.com/2010/09/wheat-and-obesity-more- from-the-china-study/)

</comment><comment><USER29> Forget about words like "fad" and "backlash". Data. That's all that matters. I am not up on the research, but I would at least like to see articles like this talk to people who are, instead of talking to random people who have no fucking clue what they're talking about :)

(Edit: and by "data", I mean things like, does reducing/eliminating gluten, or more likely, all sugar/carbs, from a diet, actually reduce productivity- sapping drowsiness? does it actually reduce weight by not stimulating insulin, etc.)

</comment><comment><USER30> The backlash comes when party guests insist on a gluten-free option, then decide that a slice of cake 'won't hurt'. So frustrating!

</comment><comment><USER31> Gluten free hasn't really hit Europe in the same way so I was really amazed when I tried a gluten free pizza for the first time a couple of weeks ago. Eating half a pizza and not having a dough-baby afterwards was quite a revelation. Can't say I'll be going gluten free but I can see how it would be a nice option to have on the menu.

<comment><USER32> oh but it has. in spain and italy, for example, they test kids in school for gluten because so much of their regular diet contains gluten. this mandatory testing has been going on for many years. even the mcdonalds in those countries have gluten free options. we are not at that point yet, here in the us.

what we have going on that europe doesn't are the growing number of people doing it voluntarily/for fun.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Article title is not supported by the article, unless you can honestly count two cranky people as the beginning of a backlash.

</comment><comment> jack-r-abbit My house would welcome a new fad for soy-free foods. But nobody gives a crap about soy being in everything. EVERYTHING. Of course, we often get handed the gluten-free menu when we ask about soy-free options. And I suspect that is because of the gluten-free fad.

</comment><comment><USER34> All I know is, my acne went away when I stopped eating wheat. Correlation != causation and all that but I aint going back because clear skin > bread. (I do miss pizza once in a while)

<comment><USER35> Amy's makes rice crust pizza that's super good!

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> There's not enough science to support either side in this debate. My guess is that a small percentage of people actually have a gluten intolerance. I also think that modern wheat can cause inflammation and gut problems. Mostly I think that reducing carbohydrates benefits anyone that isn't very active (which includes most Americans). The unfortunate truth is that the food industry is now producing more gluten-free alternatives (breads, beers, etc.), and these alternatives create a bigger insulin response than the originals.

</comment><comment><USER9> No spectrum discussion? At all? Just stereotypical hacker news pure binary 1 and 0 thinking? That's so sad.

There are people who get sick if you share gluten contaminated dishes or practically even just sniff the stuff. Toward the other end of the spectrum my medically diagnosed son doesn't explode out both ends unless he eats at least a visible amount like about a bite, kids will be kids and a stolen classmates cookie will make him puke if he eats the whole thing maybe half the time, maybe a little more, but sometimes especially when he was little he would shock us, swap sandwiches with some kid and only have diarrhea the next day no puking. Anyway, further along I feel seriously uncomfortably "blah" from too much bread or beer or pizza or baked stuff in general although I'm not diagnosed and being mostly paleo I rarely eat that junk anyway, and then there's the unaffected people.

The backlash against people who don't like feeling "blah" but can eat an oreo without vomiting is pretty annoying. So I'll eat GF with my son, in familial solidarity if nothing else, but if I see a really tasty piece of cake and my son doesn't mind if I eat it in front of him ... it would be cruel if he wanted to eat it too, but if he is full and doesn't care, he's about as libertarian as his dad, so no problemo, I'll eat the cake. So here I am, everyone dogpile on VLM because I'm (sorta) GF but I'm "that guy" who will sometimes eat a slice of cake or drink A beer, despite being GF. If that gives some 3rd party, whom I do not care about, a sad panda face, well, I can't say as I feel responsible for their feelings or really care at all beyond "too bad for them" or "hope you enjoy your pout and crying fit as much as I'm enjoying my annual slice of garlic bread".

Its like the backlash against people who eat fast food with a diet coke. Hey, if I don't want to drink any more corn syrup than necessary, so I don't, that's just too bad for you if you don't like what I'm doing. Have a nice pout while the adults eat, that's about all I can say. Try not to dehydrate yourself too severely by all the crying.

I'm about the same WRT my diet also being about 95% or so paleo. So I almost never eat cookies but I did eat a few at that 4th of July party. If what I ate rabidly infuriates you, I'm sad to report I don't give a F, hope you enjoy your rage because I don't care about your rage. I've got a little troll in me and next time I eat a cookie will probably be at a Christmas party, and I'll be sure to eat it right in front of you, I admit I'm not perfect and it is kind of funny to watch. I suspect this trolling is a large part of gluten- sorta-tolerant people eating gluten food in front of arrogant people just to make their brains explode in rage.

Some business or life advice that goes far beyond diet, is if you decide you will let other people take control of you, don't be surprised if they pull your chain a bit for fun as a semi-polite reminder that's a pretty stupid way to go thru life.

</comment><comment><USER37> wat?</comment>